begin with," commenced the Vrouw Grobelaar.
"He chose his wife for a certain quality of gentleness she
had, and though I will not deny she made him a good wife
and a patient, still gentleness will not boil a pot. He was
a fine fellow to look at; big and upstanding, with plenty
of blood in him, and a grand mat of black hair on top. He
moved like a buck; so ready on his feet and so lively in
all his movements. He might have carried you off, Katje,
and done you no good in the end.

"He was happy with his pretty wife for a while, and might
have been happy all his life and died blessedly had he but
been able to keep from conjuring up faces in his mind and
falling in love with them. Greta, his wife, had hair like
golden wheat, so smooth and rippled with light; and no
sooner had he stroked his fill of it than he conceived nut-
brown to be the most lovely color of woman's hair. Her eyes
were blue, and for half a year he loved them; then hazel
seemed to him a better sort. I said he was a fool, didn't
I?

"So his marriage to Greta became a chain instead of a
union, while the poor lass fretted her heart out over his
dark looks and short answers. He was shallow, Katje,
shallow; he had the mere capacity for love, but it was a
short way to the bottom of it. You will see by and by that
the men who deserve least always want most. Stoffel had no
right to a woman at all; when he had one, and she a good
girl, he let his eyes rove for others.

"So he went about his farm with his mind straying and his
heart abroad. If you spoke to him, he paused awhile, and
then looked at you with a start as though freshly waked. He
saw nothing as he went, neither his wife with the questions
in her eyes that she shamed to say with her lips, nor the
child that crowed at him from her arms. He was deaf and
blind to the healthy world, to all save the silly dreams
his poisoned soul fed on.

"Well, wicked or not, it is at least unsafe not to look
where one is going. This was a thing Stoffel never did:
since he overlooked his wife, it was not to be expected he
would see a strand of fencing-wire on the ground. So he
rode on to it, and down came his horse. Down came Stoffel
too, and there was a stone handy on the place where his
head lit to let some of the moonshine out of him. He saw a
heavenful of stars for a moment, and then saw nothing for a
long time. Save--one strange thing!

"When life came back to him he was in his bed very sore and
empty, and